At first I was resistant. I’m loyal to a fault, even in regards to toys. I didn’t want to like these GoBot ripoffs, but it didn’t take long for them to break me. They were bigger, shinier, more well designed and overall sexier than the the GhettoBots.

Their cartoon was even light years ahead of the shitty Challenge of the GoBots show.

Many of the G1 Transformers were just repackaged and rebranded toys from Japan. They were made with higher quality craftsmanship and the steps to “transform” them were far more complex. They were like action figure Rubik’s Cubes.

Of course they were also way WAY more expensive than GoBots, which presented a challenge for me, a kid from a lower middle income family.

I would obsess over the sale ads in the weekend paper, pointing out which ones were the coolest looking. For some reason I was drawn to the army jeep (maybe because it reminded me of G.I. Joe?)

It took awhile, but one day my dad came home from work with a surprise. My first Transformer. I don’t know where he got it, but it was the jeep, Hound.

I loved it.

Did I mention the added fun of putting all the decals on yourself? They came completely unadorned with a small sheet of stickers and an instruction booklet. The instructions not only showed you step by step how to transform the toy, but where to put all the stickers.

Much like the Joes, Transformers had a profile card on the packaging. The gimmick with these cards were the ability stats were “encoded” for secrecy. To “decode” them, you placed a thin piece of red trandparent plastic over the card which canceled out the red noise printed over the stat graph. It was genius and captured my imagination.

Over the next couple years I took it DEEEEP with Transformers. It defined my Christmases in 84/85. It seems like that period lasted so much longer. It’s hard to believe that it was really just 2 years between my first introduction to Transformers and the release of Transformers The Movie which effectively killed my passion for the line for many years. Looking at it now, that movie is fantastic, but it’s hard to watch so many characters meet their brutal end. Definitely scarring for a kid.

Luckily I got over it, and to this day I love the G1 Transformers and enjoy revisiting the original cartoon (fuck you Beast Wars) from time to time.

Well, that’s all for this week guys. Join me again next time for another peek inside Fitz’s Toy Chest!

Welcome back guys. After two weeks of Star Wars talk, I’m going to switch things up and dive into what would become the second of the three main toy collecting pillars of my childhood.

In 1982 I was a full blown Star Wars junkie, but things had slowed a bit. Jedi was still a year away, and Empire was 2 years in the rearview. Then, one day I saw this commercial:

It’s amazing that it was this shitty zero budget commercial with the terrible voiceover that grabbed my attention, but grab me it did. What WAS this? Who were these guys? They weren’t from a movie or a TV show (not yet anyway), but I knew immediately I had to have them.

It wouldn’t take long for me to discover that, while there was no movie or cartoon featuring these new badass commandos, there was a comic book launched in coordination with the toy line.

I’m pretty sure for me the toys came first, and then I found the comics shortly thereafter. Marvel used to have these 3 packs of comics. They had one for X-men, they had one for Transformers (issue 1-3 of a 4 issue mini-series, wtf you guys?), and they had one for G.I. Joe comics. I remember bringing that 3 pack home from Grandpa Pidgeon’s (Think Target if Target had a serious meth habit. They were awesome). It had issues 3,4, and 5. After that I was hooked on Larry Hama’s enduring masterpiece and it informed the backyard adventures I had with this toys for years. It was also the perfect gateway comic for me. Sure I had a few Batman comics before that and of course Star Wars comics, but these were different. They felt more grown up and serious. Later, G.I. Joe #1 would be my first wall book purchase. I dug them that much.

But I digress.

My mom was kinda reluctant to let me start a new collection of plastic junk, she was no doubt afraid how deep I would take my parents with these toys based on my obsession with Star Wars. And she wasn’t wrong to feel that way.

She finally gave in and one day I was given the green light at the Venture on Page Avenue. That store was Target’s trashier cousin. That store was probably the place I got most of my figures. Trips to Toy Chest were a relatively rare treat. Venture runs were a weekly affair.

I’m not sure what drew me to Rock ‘N Roll but that’s who I picked. Maybe it was the dope ass double ammo belts, or maybe it was because he had the biggest gun, I honestly don’t remember. What I do remember is how fantastic the card art on these figures was.

That’s one thing I should mention about these old figures is the packaging itself was as impressive as the toys themselves. I would study the pictures of the other available toys on the back, and for the Joes and Transformers, carefully clip out the character profile cards. You just don’t see that anymore and it’s a shame.

Like all of the first series of Joes they released, this Rock ‘N Roll is a “straight arm” figure. If you don’t know what that means, it means the arms do not have rotational articulation at the elbows. The 3 3/4″ Joes had very impressive articulation for the early 80s (in fact they remain far superior to modern figures in my opinion). Where Kenner Star Wars fugures only had arms that moved at the shoulder and legs that moved at the waist, Joes had bendable elbows, knees, waist, ball jointed shoulders, etc.

They were infinitely more posable that Kenner figures, but the first series still fell short in one area. This was rectified a year or two after the first figures came out with the introduction of “swivel arm battle grip” which allowed the arm to pivot at the elbow, giving the Joes more realistic grip on their guns.

Later, all of the original series would be reissued with the swivel arm battle grip. So as you can imagine, these first straight arm version 1.0 figures are much more valuable and sought after than the reissues from just a short time later.

Becauss I’m an OCD nerd that craves an unhealthy amount of information about the things he likes, my favorite part of the figures were the file cards on the back of the package. Almost all were written by the Joe comic writer Larry Hama. They started out as character bios that he would write for his own use while writing those books, but Hasbro saw what he was doing and thought they would be a great added feature for the toys.

My most vivid memory of this figure comes from a weekend when some out of town relatives came to visit. I didn’t know these people but they came by to say hi to my mom. It was just a woman and her two kids, the dad couldn’t make the trip from California. At one point the youngest kid, maybe 3 or 4 years old came running out of my bedroom yelling “Daddy! Daddy!” Everyone freaked thinking he got scared or hurt, but then we saw he was holding Rock ‘N Roll. Turns out his dad was a career soldier, that’s why he couldn’t leave the base to come to St. Louis. This poor kid thought my action figure looked like his dad and he was sad he couldn’t be with him back home!

I’m not sure what his dad looked like or if he walked around the house with and M60 and full battle fatigues, but it took some prying to dislodge Rock ‘N Roll from his hands when it was time for them to leave.

Well, that does it for this edition of Fitz’s Toy Chest. Come back next time where I will put the spotlight on the very LAST of the 80s Kenner Star Wars figures that I ever bought!

Last time on Fitz’s Toy Chest, I shared the story of my very first 3 3/4″ figure. It was not surprisingly from Kenner’s line of Star Wars figures. That figure would prove to be the very tippiest tip of the iceberg.

So, without further ado let’s see what’s in Fitz’s Toy Chest this time…

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m keeping with the early Kenner Star Wars theme, but there’s another reason why I chose to showcase Obi-Wan this week.

Last time I teased one of my earliest Star Wars memories, something my mom said as we were rifling through the figures for the first of what would be many MANY times over the years.

At that time I’m not sure that I had even seen the film yet, and if I had it was once at the most. It would be years and years until my mom would see the first Star Wars, not until the arrival of VHS in fact. So between the two of us we knew next to nothing about the world of Star Wars, and I can see and hear as clear as if it were yesterday, my mom taking a figure off the peg and lowering it down to me (yes, I was that small at the time) to look at. She said “Oh look at this one! This is Luke Skywalker’s father!”

The figure she had chosen was, you guessed it, Obi-Wan. So close mom. So. SO close.

It was a reasonable assumption, and I’m sure she only made the connection because the old white haired dude had been hanging next to a figure boldly labelled LUKE SKYWALKER, but turns out she wasn’t nearly as far off as I thought at the time.

The other thing about some of the old Kenner figures, especially in that first line, was their smell. There were no “soft goods” in those days and instead of cool cloth capes, Obi-Wan, Leia, Vader, the Sandpeople all came with crude vinyl approximations of capes.

When you first cracked open one of those figures you were hit with the smell of those vinyl capes. It was almost like a new car smell. In a way I guess it was the kid version of that. There have been many times over the years where I catch a whiff of a similar plasticky odor (like a fresh shower curtain for example) and I almost get goosebumps. That smell is forever imprinted in my olfactory system.

Sadly, those capes weren’t very durable and after a few years of heavy play they always developed splits around the arm holes that eventually grew until the cape was in tatters and unusable. As you can see my Obi-Wan’s was lost to the ages.

Old Ben was my first experience with the “telescoping” lightsaber feature that Vader and Luke also shared. I remember I used to think it was cool to take the blades out and swap the colors between the three characters. That’s probably why my Obi-Wan has my original Vader’s red lightsaber instead of the proper blue one. Who knows what became of the original. I would always lose the blades and then sometime later they’d turn up again. There were times I remember replacing a missing blade with a round toothpick. Very ghetto, but they worked just fine.

1978/79 would eventually see a second wave of Star Wars figures released. That second wave consisted mostly of brightly dressed cantina creatures and droids. It would be the start of Kenner’s long legacy of putting “blink and you miss them” characters front and center, encouraging kids like me to make them the main protoganists in their own adventures.

Before long I would have the entire line of figures from the first film, and then the wait for Empire would begin…

Thanks for indulging me for a second time, come back for another installment in 2 weeks! Next time I’ll be switching lanes and sharing something from another line of toys that dominated my childhood and oddly enough led me to a lifelong love of…comics!